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English Audio Request

LuciePetersen
434 Words / 1 Recordings / 0 Comments

Mensa used to be the only place for bright sparks. Now a young New Yorker is challenging the old guard of the IQ world - and turning his mega-mind from puzzles to world peace.
You may not recognise the name Andrew Nierman, but he is the World's Smartest Person, a title bestowed upon him earlier this year by the International High IQ Society, after he correctly answered 22 out of 25 questions in the Haselbauer-Dickheiser Test for Exceptional Intelligence. Among the things he knew was the maximum number of one-inch diameter spheres that can be packed into a box 10 inches square and five inches deep. He also knew how many pieces a doughnut can be cut into using three simultaneous plane cuts, and he determined the breeding strategies of the Furble, both dominator and sharer types, while analysing their territorial habits and attitudes with particular regard to bravery and cautiousness.
Nierman is an American, and he was one question cleverer than Hakan Yilmaz from England and Carvin Toy from Canada, and four questions cleverer than Loh Zhi Jun from Singapore. Among the three questions he got wrong, two have never been answered correctly by anyone. One requires figuring out the length of the side of a shaded square nestling within a larger square of 21 other squares of various sizes (with no dimensions on any of them), and the other requires deciphering this cryptogram of a well-known phrase:
AFFDXVXAAAGXXDF
XXFGGAFAGGXFG
AAXAAXXFXXFFFGG
AFXGGVGGAFFAAFG
VGGAXFXGXXFFAAF
XDFFFAVFDXFDDXF
More than 60,000 people have taken a shot at this question online, but the only people who know the answer are the two friends - Nathan Haselbauer and Mike Dickheiser - who devised the test. (Any 'answers' that you may find online are, they say, incorrect.) Haselbauer, a 28-year-old New Yorker with a big smile but virtually no hair, used to earn a lot of money on Wall Street but found the work intellectually stultifying. After trading stock options for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, he wanted to discuss books or religion, but found that his colleagues preferred football or cars. He thought about joining Mensa, the best-known club for clever people seeking bright companions, and sent off for a home test. He passed and was invited to a supervised test, but by this time he was getting bored with the process.
'I thought, in the day of the internet, is this the most efficient way of doing things? All those delays and waiting around for results. I wanted to sign up for a high IQ society that wasn't like that, but then I looked around and there were none.'

Recordings

  • OK, if you’re so clever…, Guardian part 1 ( recorded by phoenixtorte ), Pittsburgh or North-Eastern American English

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